Just to say that I very much agree with your sadness. What a deplorable turn in language use that “social justice activism” has now become associated with a certain kind of social justice activism!
PS: of course, we can make a theoretical distinction between promoting aggregrate welfare and promoting justice (eg when one option benefits millions at the expense of one person—this might be considered unjust but welfare-increasing). But in practice, promoting justice and aggregate welfare are much more overlapping than is often recognized—but as you and I do seem to recognize…
dominicroser
Karma: 527
Great—thanks very much!
My personal take is that Musk is fairly mysterious. Hence, I don’t think there is sufficient evidence that he just says these things for personal gain?
I don’t mean this to defend him, to the contrary. It makes the world more uncertain that one the most powerful persons has such an insrutable personality. I think it would be worth foregoing Musk’s upside potential for this world, if he were just more boring and predictable.
How open are you to people with one leg in traditional academia and one leg in Seeds of Science?
PS: and just a general remark: this seems like such a valuable experiment. Big thanks for your courage! At the moment, it seems bewilderingly open-ended but I, as far as I can judge, it seems absolutely worth seeing what comes out of it.
Thanks for writing this up so nicely. The framing in terms of EA relevance is perfect.
Here’s another question I have that would be relevant to EA. Do you think that currently the risks from Back Contamination and Forward Contamination receive too much attention (relative to other risks)? In other words: is there some inertia in the sense that once a novel catastrophic risk does get recognized as a serious issue, it then doesn’t easily get out of people’s minds & institutional processes again?
(The background for my question is this: I read quite a bit about space ethics and sustainability in recent months. At times, I was astonished to see how often back & forward contamination come up as one of the “big topics” in space ethics/sustainability discussions. According to my—extremely unreliable—intuition, I found it hard to see why planetary protection should be such a central topic given that space exploration comes with many other major risks & opportunities. This was just my vague, subjective impression...)
Thanks!
Economics professor Reiner Eichenberger has looked into this: https://road.cc/content/news/cycling-live-blog-15-november-2022-297375#live-blog-item-39683
However, I would not recommend to trust his views. While he is insightful and interesting, he is also one of the most contrarian, provocation-loving people I know. Plus, these thoughts are published in a column for a small newspaper rather than an academic journal.
If you ever find someone who has seriously looked into that question, I’d be interested to know.
The basic question makes sense, though: walking and cycling use energy, too—just like cars do. And if the energy used for walking comes from eating climate-harming food, there is a question to be asked about the climate-friendliness of walking.
Thanks, that is a word of wisdom. I’ll have to practice this!
Here’s one challenge to your (convincing!) post: One of the only ways I get anything done in life is by promising it to someone and then being held accountable. What I achieve depends on what I promise—there are no independently “realistic deadlines” for me. However, I usually don’t achieve it by the date I promise. If I promise it by February, I get it done by March. But it wouldn’t help if I promised it by March. In that case, I would just achieve it by April.
While I’m exaggerating a bit to make my point clear, the upshot is that even though I agree with your reasoning, I’m still not sure I should underpromise—because it would just mean I achieve less? Overpromising is one of my only ways of making me move forward.
Thanks very much!
Two questions:
(1) I have had to introduce cognitive biases to people myself and was wondering what reasons to give for the the precise selection of biases I present. As far as these 10 biases are concerned: Is it just a judgement call to choose this specific list of biases—as they kind of seem practically relevant and much discussed? Or is there a more systematic reason for choosing these 10 or any other list?
(2) Yudkowsky’s list is from 2008. Much has happened since. It would be nice if there were kind of a running update on which cognitive biases have moved up / down over time in terms of being supported by the evidence.
Focusmate.com
Among the many things I’ve tried, this has been one of the most useful.
PS: Among the other many things I’ve tried, one I would not give up is “Sabbath rest” (and I don’t move it to some other day of the week depending on circumstances—it’s just a strict rule of no work from dawn-to-dawn or midnight-to-midnight on Sunday). One side effect of this is that it ‘gives me permission’ to occasionally ‘overdo’ work during the week since a minimal and basic amount of rest is guaranteed, come what may.
oh dear. Thanks for spotting this—really appreciated. We’ll add the correction.
Thanks!
Hm, hard question.
Personally, I would think:
-- If we don’t radically expand our concern and love relative to the status quo, we are not following the teachings of Christ
—It’s hard to see the specific kind and strength of impartiality that utilitarianism recommends in the Bible (but this doesn’t mean, as I said in the first point, that the status quo is OK)
The post is really nicely structured and written.
However, to me the key debate is not whether it’s possible to have growth while (1) protecting the planet and (2) eradicating poverty. The question is how probable it is. I have generally found the arguments by the degrowth people quite convincing that it is in many ways improbable.
However, strictly speaking, the question is not even how improbable it is but the comparative question whether it is more improbable than having degrowth while (1) protecting the planet and (2) eradicating poverty. And this, I find even more improbable.
In other words: we should not just examine how growth makes poverty-eradication-cum-protecting-the-planet hard, but we should equally carefully examine how degrowth makes it hard—and probably even harder.
I have been looking for a while now for good literature that provides arguments or evidence how reducing growth in rich countries would hurt/benefit the poor.
I agree that Hickel doesn’t seem very trustworthy on this. I have looked a bit at the degrowth/post-growth literature and haven’t found detailed, convincing engagement on this question.
I’ve also looked elsewhere but I still don’t know what literature to rely on—despite its being such a core and straightforward question. Any advice on what to read on this would be appreciated.
I quite agree with this, particularly since there is a straightforward explanation why Christian scripture would not have focused on people far away in time and space: there were fewer technological possibilities for affecting people far away than there are today. [Edit: I now realize this point appears in footnote 2]
I do find it noteworthy that on the one occasion where Jesus was asked whom to count as a neighbour, he deliberately expands the circle and asks listeners to think about whom they can be a neighbour to.
Is there a typo in the first sentence—should it say impartiality rather than partiality?
I love this post.
BTW, note that there have been two entries on closely related themes for the Cause Exploration Prize: here and here.
I think it is curious that effective altruism doesn’t talk more about friendships or, more broadly, relationships. As far as I understand, relationships are a key determinant of happiness. Also, relationships are one of the first things that come to mind when objective list theorists try to explain to hedonists what might matter in addition to happiness. Relationships thus seem important.
They also seems neglected: I can remember few deliberate policy interventions aimed at promoting good relationships. It might be such a cross-cutting and vague issue that it simply didn’t occur to many that the broad goal of promoting good relationships merits intense attention.
It’s a bit harder to see how it’s tractable.
In my view, there’s a further consideration in favour of your suggestion: by making non-optimal charities/capital marginally more effective, we’re spreading the “effectiveness meme”.
By opening people’s eyes to the magic of improving effectiveness, we’re putting them on a track towards further effectiveness improvements. Once they see how they can marginally improve effectiveness, they might ask themselves “Why not go further, and improve effectiveness ever more”—and this is one route into an EA-style mindset.